Julien "Stazma" Guillot (aka The Junglechrist) is a French producer, electronic music educator and mastering engineer known for his breakcore improvisation beats and educational YouTube videos about modules and other gear.
In this interview, Stazma talks about teaching modular, his live setup, making people dance to breakcore, getting into electronic music as a metalhead through Aphex Twin, his approach to mastering, and dealing with Facebook trolls.
Can you talk about the courses and teaching you are doing right now?
The course I'm doing right now is organized by a company in Lyon that does a lot of courses for professional artists. The place I work for does teaching sessions for comedians, sound engineers and other professions as well. They’re already doing lots of teaching for Ableton, so I guess I’m the guy they hired to do modular stuff. They were like “you wanna do it?”, and I just said “sure!” (laughs).
I really like teaching in general and teaching is about half of my income now. I also do one-on-one teaching. The other half of my income is mostly mastering and doing shows, although I’ve been doing less shows than I used to do, mostly because I have children now.
You are teaching mostly modular, right?
This thing here in Lyon is the only IRL teaching I do. It’s these big two-week sessions where we can go very deep into the modular stuff. It’s a sound synthesis course, using modular. You need to really figure it [synthesis] out with modular, so it’s a nice way of learning, I think.
It’s mostly professional musicians that take these courses. When you are legally classified as a professional artist in France, you can do these courses for free, as part of your salary automatically goes towards funding these sorts of things. It would be very expensive to take these courses otherwise. So it’s mostly artists, but artists from very diverse backgrounds. When I started doing this, I was expecting mostly techno people. But then for the first two years, it was mostly jazz people (laughs), since they also have an interest in experimental music and all the weird stuff you can do with modular. So it’s very diverse.
Do you have a certain approach or program you employ when teaching modular?
I designed the course program here in Lyon with the help of the boss of the teaching company, he really helped me out with that, which has been very helpful. So I follow the course program, but I can also go with the flow, it depends on how many people attend. The maximum number of people we can do is five. I always have one system per student. But for example, in this course I’m doing right now it’s only two people. So we have a lot of time for questions, especially with a two week course.
The first week is really about taking apart the whole [modular] thing. I draw patches on the whiteboard and I separate the audio and the CV path with visual graphics — so red is the audio path, and blue is the CV path and so on. Usually, the second week is more about sitting down together and making more complex patches, where one person makes a kickdrum, and another person makes a hi-hat, for example.
Do people usually get the concept of modular quickly, or can it take a while?
Especially people that are already familiar with [fixed architecture] keyboard synths, they tend to have a lot of pre-conceived notions about signal flow. So they think they know everything, but then it’s like “oh boy!” . So usually, at the end of the first day, everyone is depressed (laughs), because it’s like everything they thought they knew [about synthesis] is gone. But then on the second and third day, they tend to get familiar with how it works. As for myself, I’ve learned modular by just reading things and trying out different patches. So it took me months and months of just being like “this should work — oh, no I’m stupid!” (laughs). This kind of teaching makes that learning experience way faster.
How did you get into making music yourself?
My parents had some vinyl, and I guess I was just interested in those records. It was mostly classic French songs, but also Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, stuff like that. I also have two older brothers that were very into metal and reggae at the time, so I guess I was growing up with all that stuff, a little bit of everything — that’s how I ended up listening to all the most crazy music (laughs)!
As a kid I was really a big metalhead, playing bass guitar. I was already into the weirder metal stuff by age 14-15, but back then I thought electronic music was kind of shit, like “nobody is actually playing instruments!”. But then, one time after going to a show in Lyon — seeing System Of A Down or something like that — an older guy we were staying with said “oh, so you think electronic music is shit? Check this out!” (laughs), and he put on this DVD, which was a Chris Cunningham music video DVD with Aphex Twin’s Come to Daddy, Björk and a few others. And really, Come to Daddy just blew my mind! I think a lot of other metal heads had a similar experience with that, being like “okay, now I can listen to electronic music” (laughs). And from there, it was obvious to move towards stuff like Venetian Snares and jungle.
How did you get into playing synthesizers?
Like I said, I was playing bass and I started writing songs for this band I had. I used a MIDI program called Guitar Pro where you can write and play guitar tabs, and I also started writing for other parts. And I realized it was more fun to just compose crazy stuff that is impossible for a human to play (laughs). So I was writing music with just this MIDI program for a year or two, and what I was doing was almost like breakcore already! And then somebody showed me FL Studio, and I started using that and later Ableton and got really into doing a lot of sampling in the box. I also started discovering VST synths and virtual modular synthesizers, these early VSTs from the mid-2000s, like one of the first versions of Arturia’s virtual Moog Modular (Modular V).
I eventually got into hardware, because with my background as a bass player, I really wanted to play an actual instrument. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy computers and I’ve made a lot of music with just a computer. But over time, I guess I was just like, I want to play with actual physical knobs and stuff, instead of just programming in things with my mouse. My first synth was the Moog Sub Phatty, and then an old 303 clone, some drum machines and so on.
As for modular, I really got into the Reaktor Blocks thing at some point, which really made me want to try actual hardware modular. I had been interested in modular for a long time, it just took time for me to be able to afford hardware modules. But then around that time, I stopped smoking and started biking instead of taking public transport, so there suddenly was much more money in my bank account (laughs)! So I was like ok, let’s buy some modules! That’s how it started with hardware modular for me. I bought a case and one VCO and then started buying one module at a time.
I think what kept me from doing it for a long time was the case, because it was like, “I don’t want to buy this case, it’s 400 euros and doesn’t make any sound, it’s just there to put the even more expensive stuff in there!” (laughs). But then I randomly found this really cool DIY case, made from this blue aluminum suitcase from the French marine, with an anchor logo on it. So it was really nice to look at and also portable and I went and bought it from the guy who made it. But yeah, the case was the most daunting part for sure, I think.
I feel like using modular for breakcore is somewhat unusual.
I think a lot of people with this kind of music are definitely more sample based. I’ve always used a lot of samples, but I also just really enjoy [modular] synthesis for bass sounds, general weird sounds, ambiences and so on, which I often resample later. I still primarily use the modular like this, making scary noises, and then resampling them for other purposes.
How do you integrate the modular into your writing process?
Often after making a sound on the modular, I’m like “this sounds awesome!” and add some drums to it, and so on. I also start a lot of stuff on the Polyend Tracker. Often, I just make a drum pattern, and then I think “this would sound good with this [modular] filter, let’s make a bass patch to go along with this”, etc. So I get excited and then I usually write tracks very quickly. I work on them like crazy for a day or two, and then later I spend a lot of time just figuring out the details. If I’m writing synth lines, it’s usually all on the modular with the rest on top. Sometimes I have the melody and parts already written in MIDI, and I want to have it played by something else from the modular and create a patch just for that.
Can you say something about your live setup?
My live set is the thing that took me the longest to figure out, I think. Because with electronic music, everyone has to figure out a way to play live that is right for them. It’s not like you have this guitar and this amp and then you just play, there’s no real “recipe” for it. For me, I really wanted to be able to have fun on stage. My first live experiences were terrible, because I had all these ideas, like “I’m not using quantize!” but I quickly realized that with the tempos I am working at — sometimes over 200 BPM — I really needed sync (laughs). I needed to find a way to make it so I can fuck up, but I can’t completely fuck up. In general, I strongly believe that if you have fun on stage, people will also have fun. I’ve often had people come up to me after my set, being like “I don’t like breakcore, but I’ve danced through your whole set!” and that’s really some of the best feedback I’ve ever gotten, making me feel like “I won!” (laughs).
Because with electronic music, everyone has to figure out a way to play live that is right for them.
There’s two parts to the live set. First, there’s a big controller, the Livid Instruments Block, that works a bit like a Launchpad and that can trigger clips. I use it to travel through my Ableton session. Then, there’s a point in the session where I will trigger a long loop and I have different sample slice points that I can trigger. On the other controller, the MIDI Fighter, I have a few banks of breakbeats that I use with a crossfader. So I can fade between the regular breakbeat of the track and break samples I can trigger live, finger drumming style. That’s definitely the main part of the set for me, triggering these drums on top, or instead of, the loops from Ableton. So with that live triggering element, even if I were to play the same set playlist ten times in a row — which I don’t do — it would never be the same set. But yeah, I had to really figure out what works for me, which took a lot of trial and error. But I haven’t touched the skeleton of the live set for years now, because it just works so well.
Never change a running system!
Exactly! At one point, I was even trying to integrate modular into the live set. But I’ve just found that if I have something other than the breakbeats and effects going on, I just end up not really doing anything with clear intent, it’s too much. I have another live project where I only use hardware. And even there, it was the same story. At first, I was trying to play with a lot of gear, but now I’ve learned that the less gear I bring, the more efficient and fun it is really.
How did you get into making videos for YouTube?
It was during Covid, when I was not very inspired to write tracks. I wasn’t depressed or anything, because I had just moved to the countryside, so it was quite nice, but yeah (laughs). The start of it was that a lot of people have asked me about my live set over the years, so I decided to make a video about that. And also at that time Polyend were just starting to post about their Tracker. I was very interested in it and have some experience as a beta tester, so I sent them an Email to see if I could get one to test. And they basically instantly very politely said no. But in my Email, I had also sent them some download codes for one of my albums. And then a few hours later, they replied again and said, “we’ve been listening to your album very loudly in our office, so yes, we are sending you one” (laughs)! So I also started to make some videos specifically about the Polyend Tracker.
I don’t really care about being a big-time YouTuber. Even though for me the YouTube thing has really exceeded everything I had imagined, it’s still quite small in the grand scheme of things. But I have a lot of fun doing it, the hard part is really just keeping up with the amount of modules I get sent to review (laughs). I like my schedule of doing one video a week, and I’ve figured out a little video setup, one that’s very unprofessional, but works for me — I film with this broken phone that doesn’t work anymore as a phone, but for some reason its camera really works with the lightning in the studio, so I just keep it just for that. I was doing more involved editing at some point, but now I’m more relaxed with that and I just really concentrate on talking about the modules.
Do you have a general approach or ethos for dealing with YouTube and social media?
My approach is really just trying to talk to the camera in the same way I would be when showing something to a friend, not trying to be too technical. At first it was a bit weird, talking to no one, but I guess I’ve gotten used to it now (laughs). I’ve started to incorporate some hand drawn drawings into my videos, we’ll see how that goes.
With Instagram and other social media, for me they are really primarily promotion tools. If I wasn’t doing music that I would like people to be aware of, I probably wouldn’t be using it. Social media is useful for promotion, but also a real pain in the ass sometimes. But I’ve found a way to keep a consistent posting schedule, mostly using things I’ve already made, like bits from YouTube videos and live shows.
Some of my content has been very successful at certain points, especially with Facebook with my Dimanche / Sunday Violence series, these short live breakcore videos. I remember, I did one video on Facebook that the algorithm blew up way out of proportion. It got like 4000 Likes and more than 2000 shares — and a lot of those people were very mad about it, they were almost offended, like “this is not music!” (laughs). There’s still one troll guy that comes back every week to comment on my posts, saying I have a mental illness or something, but I’m just like “it’s alright man, don’t worry about it” (laughs). It’s very weird sometimes, this social media thing. I prefer real life!
How did you get into mastering?
I went to school for audio engineering — the only proper formal education I ever did! In the beginning, I really started mastering out of necessity, as I had just moved to Lyon with some friends and I needed money. And I thought, I have this audio engineering training and I’m probably the closest thing to a professional sound engineer in this breakcore scene I’m involved with, so I might be able to make a bit of money just making people's tracks sound better. From there it evolved over time, just gradually buying some outboard gear, getting better speakers and so on. But like with everything else I do, for me it was never like “this has to work, now!”, I was more like “I like doing this, let’s try it and see if it works — okay, it works — let’s just build on that further”. I like taking things slowly, but in the end, that worked out and I was able to make a full-time living from music and have been doing so for six years now.
What’s your approach when it comes to dealing with mastering clients? I think some producers have this expectation that mastering is this magic thing that will instantly make all their tracks sound amazing (laughs). And what kind of loudness levels are aiming for these days?
When I do mastering for other people, I really approach it as a technician, I’m not there to say if the track is good or bad. But doing mastering now often also involves teaching people a bit when it comes to the technical side if they are amateurs. When it’s professionals or people who have been doing it for a long time and there’s no technical issues, you can really just focus on making it sound as good as possible. People often do have this expectation that when they send me a track to master, it will immediately sound amazing. But for me, the crucial part of mastering is really about making an album or EP of tracks sound good together, so that you can listen to it as a whole and there isn’t one track that’s too loud or too bright and it takes you out of it.
With the loudness thing, with streaming normalization and everything, I do think it is a bit better now than it was seven or eight years ago. Back then, people always wanted stuff to be super loud, but now I’m getting that much less. I usually end up hitting around -10 LUFS, and I think around -9 LUFS to -10 LUFS is a good compromise in terms of loudness. I generally try to use as little digital limiting and clipping as possible. I have a nice analog chain with tube saturation that I like to use to get a bit more loudness, like the mastering edition Thermionic Culture Vulture, which “decapitates” peaks in a very nice way! (laughs)
Do you have any favorite pieces of gear?
For mastering, definitely the Culture Vulture. For modular, it would probably be my Serge TKB panel, it’s just so raw and free in the way you can patch it and it has a really nice interface. In general, for me, what has really always fascinated me more than anything about electronic instruments is the interface. I also really like the interface of Verbos Electronics and the Tiptop Audio Buchla modules. In general, I like stuff with nice colors that’s inviting, but sometimes also stuff that looks more dark and weird, it’s very subjective. But to me, just the way something looks and the way in which you interact with it is often more important than the sound, because the way in which you interact with it really determines what kind of places you can go to with it.
to me, just the way something looks and the way in which you interact with it is often more important than the sound
For example, with the Polyend Tracker, for me that is really one of the best pieces of gear ever, in terms of the interface. The combination of that jogwheel and the pads to enter data and notes is just perfect, the first time I used it I was like “yes, finally! breakcore in 10 seconds!” (laughs). I just like the way I can work with it, I don’t care so much about the sound. If I see something where I like the interface, I am always curious to try it out — I always like trying new things!
You can find Stazma over on Instagram and YouTube and his website. You can find his latest music releases over at Bandcamp, like the “Caring Too Much” EP.